


flower-petal tears do not even appear

by lilacmeadows



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Best Friends, F/F, Flowers, Friends to Lovers, Hanahaki Disease, Language of Flowers, Mutual Pining, No Dialogue, Not Actually Unrequited Love, One Shot, Royalty, neha's pov, no real dialogue because i suck at it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:28:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24782332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilacmeadows/pseuds/lilacmeadows
Summary: Neha knows better than anyone what the blue flower petals she keeps coughing up mean, but she's nothing if not good at avoiding the truth.Or: Neha ends up with Hanahaki because she falls in love with her best friend and doesn't know that Annika loves her back.
Relationships: Annika/Neha (The Dragon Prince)
Kudos: 12





	flower-petal tears do not even appear

**Author's Note:**

> Hello lovely people! This is a hanahaki au because I love that trope and don't see it enough, so I hope you enjoy! 
> 
> P.S. Please leave comments/kudos/constructive criticism, because I live for that stuff and I love interacting with you guys :)

_Hanahaki Disease_ is a disease in which the victim coughs up flower petals when they suffer from one-sided love. It ends when the beloved returns their feelings (romantic love only; strong friendship is not enough), or when the victim dies. It can be cured through surgical removal, but when the infection is removed, the victim's romantic feelings for their love also disappear.

✿✿✿

Neha swears she’d never meant to let it get this far. She’s staring down at the deep blue petal cupped in her palm, horror clouding her eyes at the blood-splattered fragment of a flower scarcely larger than her fingernail, and finally realizes just how royally she’s messed up.

A couple of weeks ago, she and Annika were in the village for the Day of Plenty, the traditional week-long festival honoring the yearly harvest. They were spending increasingly more and more time together, now that Neha’s nineteenth birthday was just on the horizon, and with it an abundance of new duties she would have to tackle as she prepared more seriously for her role as Queen. Her father’s illness was growing more severe, and with her mother long gone, her people looked to her for guidance. They both knew that once her coronation was here, they would be hard-pressed to find time to spend together, so these last few months were a somber mix of celebration and goodbye. Their friendship was strong, but Annika was a shop-owner in the village that peddled little trinkets and had no real place in the palace. 

So there they were, giggling over the silly little masks being sold at street stands, arguing over which ride to go on next, when Annika spotted a woman running a weaving stall. 

“Oh my god, we have got to go get some!” Annika had exclaimed, pulling on her arm. 

Neha still remembers the gleam in her friend’s eye as she dragged them over and exchanged a few silver pieces for matching flower crowns, each wreath decked out in an array of fiery autumnal foliage and warm toned blooms. She had been entirely too grateful that her skin tone hid her blush as Annika had placed the crown over her gold circlet, Neha then picking up the second crown to place it over Annika’s bright white hair. The princess’s heartbeat had changed pace, fluttering abruptly before settling into a comforting steady rhythm, like sitting down with a cup of tea after a rough day of endless council meetings.

Now, she tears her gaze away from the flower in her hand and drags her eyes up to the flower crown, dried and crinkly, hanging from her bedpost. It’s a stark contrast to the petal in her palm, the cobalt blue of Annika’s eyes instead of the warm honey of the crown, but she doesn’t doubt the connection.

✿✿✿

A few days later, after she’s coughed up a few more petals and carefully dried the blood off of each one, she brings them down to the palace gardners for identification. She’s grateful for their discretion, the first time she can ever remember being glad that most don’t dare question the crown princess, and learns that the petals belong to the agapanthus flower. Though she isn’t the most skilled at flower terminology, she knows her flora well enough—after all, Duren is known for its history of farming, and her tutors ensured that she was far from clueless on the subject. It only takes a few moments of flipping through her old textbooks to find the page she’s looking for: the symbolism of the agapanthus. She skims the section, ignoring the meanings that she knows make no sense—beauty, fertility, chastity, peace, tranquility—and laughs when she sees the one that does. Concealed love. 

✿✿✿

She doesn’t tell anyone. She’s not a fool, she knows the signs of Hanahaki as well as anyone with a fondness for classic novels does (she coughed up _flower petals_ , there’s no denying the disease). But she knows that it is slow-moving and curable through one of two ways. The first option is the simplest: turning unrequited love into requited love by confessing. But the problem with this option is that for it to work as a cure, the patient has to be completely convinced that their feelings are returned, and that they are of the same nature. Neha knows that Annika loves her, being best friends for well over a decade has made this abundantly clear, but she is also so wholly sure that Annika could never love her in the way Neha has come to realize, in the way that makes her want to spend every waking moment at her best friend’s side. Besides, Neha would never risk destroying their bond by confessing silly feelings of love. She values their friendship too much to even think of doing something that could complicate it.

The second option is a bit more complicated, and comes with the added risk that it doesn’t always work: surgery. The idea of not surviving the procedure doesn’t scare Neha, and she knows that having access to the best royal doctors means she’s more than likely to be fine, but what scares her is knowing that all romantic feelings will be torn away from her with the success of it. The surgery is the only cure anyone’s been able to find, even once elves started experiencing the rare disease and searched for a magical cure in Xadia, and while it’s a safe bet, almost no one ever chooses it because of the loss of passion that comes with it.

This alone almost deters Neha away from even considering it, but instead of dismissing the idea altogether, she vows to herself that if the disease progresses too far and she doesn’t find a way to rid herself of it, that she’ll go through with the procedure. After all, with no heir and no siblings, she has her kingdom to think of, and her people always come first.

✿✿✿

Months go by. For the most part she continues to cough up half flowers and torn petals, though the cough increases in frequency. Her nineteenth birthday comes and goes, and she’s able to spend the eve of it on horseback with Annika, a quiet walk through the forest with moonshade vines blooming overhead. She’s crowned queen, and is catapulted even deeper into the world of diplomacy and laws that she grew up in. Her visits to Annika become less frequent, only partially because of her newly hectic schedule. Neha knows it’s wrong to avoid her best friend, but she’s so afraid that Annika will figure it out if they’re together, because no one knows Neha better. Thankfully, Annika doesn’t sound suspicious in their correspondence, and she’s grateful for the constancy of their letters, because it is the only thing keeping the young queen sane.

She starts coughing up whole flowers a week before her father dies, his heart giving out one day when Neha is in a meeting. She remembers the guard racing into the room and whispering in the ear of her most trusted advisor, the confusion creasing her brow as she was led out by her personal crownguard, the numbness setting in as she hears the news, sees her father’s corpse, dismissing her maids when they tried to give her dinner a few hours later. 

The appropriate period of mourning follows, the traditional nine days for a King of Duren. The entire kingdom is shrouded in white, and Neha ends up going to see Annika, because she can’t stand to be away from the one person she has left in the world any longer. She invites Annika to stay in her court, and she agrees to stay, leaving her neighbor in charge of her shop.

But being so close to Annika is both comforting and unbearable, a strange sort of sweet torture. One day, Neha’s cough starts to worsen rapidly, and she can’t go more than an hour without coughing up a handful of flowers. She rarely coughs up petals anymore, now they’re always full blue flowers and even a few leaves if she’s really doing bad, and it’s getting so hard to hide. She ends up hiding in her quarters for the day, trying to compose herself for the dinner event with Evenere dignitaries, when another coughing fit hits her.

Heaving, flower after flower starts pouring out of her mouth, covering the ground around her as she drops to her knees. The sounds of her own hacking are so loud, she doesn’t even hear the doors creak open, the soft “Neha?” in her best friend’s voice, the startled shriek from Annika as she races towards Neha’s collapsed form. Annika takes her hand in hers, incessantly pleading with her to be alright, words that are deaf to Neha’s ears. Her vision grows cloudy. Her lips curve into a smile. White hair and blue eyes are the last thing Neha sees as the world fades into black.

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I know you probably hate me for that ambiguous ending but I swear that Neha doesn't die and it's all good!
> 
> So this fic didn’t really talk about Annika’s pov but in my head that ending scene freaked out Annika because she also had hanahaki (I like to think she realized her feelings during their horseback ride right before Neha’s birthday/coronation) and seeing Neha’s flowers cured her hanahaki on the spot which then led to them speaking about it after Neha woke up (a better writer than me would have made the ending mean that Neha has to get the surgery but I'm soft and want the best for my queens so Neha only passed out for a few hours in this universe) and then courting before getting married about a year later with the full adoration of the kingdom and then several years later in their late 20's they ended up having Aanya about a year before they sacrificed their lives for Duren (I also have this headcanon that Aanya is their biological child and that reproduction works differently in their universe because in the show Aanya's eyes are exactly like Neha's and her skin tone matches Annika's so she's likely related to both of them)
> 
> (Also if anyone was wondering the other side to this is that Annika coughed up gardenias, which symbolize a lot of things but one of their meanings is a secret love between two people and I like to think that signifies how they both loved each other secretly without the other knowing it or without admitting it to themselves before they came clean and stuff)
> 
> (Annika’s gardenias were a whitish gold color, which isn’t a real gardenia color, but this is my fantasy world where flowers can be shiny gold okay)
> 
> (The white represents pure love plus Duren’s colors are white and blue which mirrors how they each had one of Duren’s colors on their flowers respectively, and the gold is for royalty plus it’s the color of Neha’s eyes)
> 
> Okay I feel like I overused their names? This is sadly my first time writing anything with a lgbtq relationship as the main focus and I’ve gotta say, how do you writers out there who do this regularly not get confused with pronouns? I swear the number of times I typed “her” only to realize it wasn’t clear whom I was referring to was ridiculous lmao
> 
> Absolutely no one asked but the reason they wear white for mourning in Duren is because in India people typically wear white for funerals and both Neha and Aanya are common Indian names so I made the executive decision to give Duren a bit of Indian inspired culture (fun fact: my family is Indian American so I swear this isn’t just me googling about Indian culture lol)
> 
> (Extra fun fact: my name is also Neha! i totally freaked when I learned that one of the queens of Duren was also named Neha which is half of the reason why I wrote this ngl)
> 
> Btw I got really into the research for flowers for this and want to mention that the flower that Neha was coughing up is also known as the African lily or lily of the Nile but since this is a fantasy world setting I didn’t want to use those names since Africa doesn’t exist in tdp's world (side note: is their world called Xadia or is that just the part of the continent with the elves? do they even have a name for their world? is it just Earth?)
> 
> I also thought using the agapanthus was a cool idea because they were used for Queen Victoria’s casket so they’ve got some royal lineage just like our queens of Duren!
> 
> Oh and this is completely unnecessary to mention but the day of plenty holiday I mentioned was based on that theory that Romans celebrated a harvest day for their goddess Pomona (this isn’t proven historically but I like to think it happened just for fun)
> 
> Also according to the tdp wiki Duren’s known for their harvest and flowers and stuff so this all felt very fitting for the queens of Duren
> 
> Btw I am terribly sorry there isn't any dialogue in this but I am absolutely terrible at writing it and I wanted this to be pretty simple/introspective
> 
> Also also the title comes from the song Forecast Fascist Future, which I have literally never listened to but I was looking up flower themed lyrics and liked these so credit to them
> 
> Credit to fanlore.org for the definition of hanahaki!
> 
> (Unrelated to anything having to do with this fic, but does anyone know where/how I can get a beta reader? I'm attempting to write a multi-chapter fic about aged-up Aanya/Ezran so it would be amazing to have a beta but I've never had one before so idk how they work)
> 
> Jeez I had a lot of notes for this so if you read all that props to you and thanks for sticking around! Anyways I hope you enjoyed and please please comment because I love seeing what you guys have to say!!


End file.
